GETTING PERSONAL

An individual boot screen, a tasteful login background, and an upbeat desktop theme can help you personalize your Linux system. But which controls will you need to tweak? This article describes some techniques for personalizing your desktop.

Before your get started with customizing, it is a good idea to think about the way the system starts. When you switch your computer on, the BIOS loads the bootloader, which then initializes the kernel. The kernel then hands over control to the init process, which launches the services. This process finally takes you to the login manager on most systems.

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Users interested in customizing even the smallest detail of their machines will probably want to modify the boot screen. We show you how to carry out this task with openSUSE 11, Ubuntu 8.x, and their derivatives.